Physical Time and Human Time

TL;DR

This paper argues that physical and human perceptions of time are compatible, emphasizing an evolving universe, the role of quantum collapse, and the brain's imperfect clock, challenging the timeless Block Universe view.

Contribution

It clarifies misconceptions about spacetime, proposing an evolving universe model and linking quantum processes to the perception of time.

Findings

The universe is an Evolving Block Universe with a time-dependent boundary.

Time passage is associated with quantum wave function collapse.

The brain's perception of time is an imperfect, contextual coarse-graining of physical time.

Abstract

This is a comment on both Gruber et al (2022) and Bunamano and Rovelli (2022), which discuss the relation between physical time and human time. I claim here, contrary to many views discussed there, that there is no foundational conflict between the way physics views the passage of time and the way the mind/brain perceives it. The problem rather resides in a number of misconceptions leading to the representation of spacetime as a timeless Block Universe. The physical expanding universe is in fact an Evolving Block Universe with a time-dependent future boundary. This establishes a global direction of time that determines local arrows of time. Furthermore time passes when quantum wave function collapse takes place; during this process, information is lost. The mind/brain acts as an imperfect clock, which coarse-grains the physical passage of time along a world line to determine the experienced passage of time, because neuronal processes take time to occur. This happens in a contextual way, so experienced time is not linearly related to physical time in general. Finally I point out that the Universe is never infinitely old: its future endpoint always lies infinitely faraway in the future